Imagining differently: Relationships between reading and gaming habits, mental imagery construction, and perspective-taking when processing a fictional narrative scene
This article discusses the results of an experiment which investigated relationships between participants' reading and gaming histories, their mental imagery construction, and their perspective-taking within that mental imagery construction, when reading a short fictional scenic narrative. Participants (n=106) read segments of a text, selected images corresponding with their visualisation of the scene, and completed a questionnaire probing reading and gaming habits. The resulting data suggest that reading habits may mediate text-prompted mental imagery construction and perspective-taking in two ways: participants who read frequently had a greater tendency to visualise the scene during reading than those who did not read frequently; and participants who read frequently had a greater tendency to visualise the scene from an internal perspective (i.e., the perspective of the character or character-narrator within the fictional scene) than participants who did not read frequently, irrespective of the person and tense of the text stimuli. The resulting data also suggest that computer game playing habits, in particular preferences regarding gaming mode, may mediate textprompted mental imagery construction and perspective-taking: participants who were allocated texts in the present tense and first or second person and who preferred subjective (i.e., 'first person') computer games were less likely to visualise the scene from an internal perspective than participants who did not prefer subjective computer games. This article discusses the possible reasons for these correlations, focussing on differences between experiences of imagery in response to textual and visual media and differences between experiences of absorption in reading and gaming
